You don’t hear much about mania anymore. The word’s out of fashion although the phenomena isn’t. People still go crazy for stuff. For people. Animals. Things. Anything. Depends on the mood. And if the mood says mania, mania it is.

Fort Langley’s a nice town. Nice little town. There’s a fort there, a replica of the 1830s and it’s worth a visit if you’re in the area. That’s probably how Justin Trudeau’s father felt when he landed in a helicopter on the grounds of the Fort in the year Nineteen-Hundred and Sixty-Eight.

He came out of the sky riding shotgun in a Bell 47 and whup-whupped down to an insane hoard of flag waving people. A lot of kids in the crowd. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon and everybody seemed to be embracing the mania. A smallish version of the flag had been handed out and it was a big fluttering and flapping and screaming and fainting as Trudeau Sr. exited the chopper and came straight to the mic.

As a small, fur-bearing baby rodent I was concerned about getting stomped in all this happiness and euphoria. Canada’s PET was headlining the Liberal federal election campaign. Oh my, Grandma said. This guy’s hot.

I quite liked Pierre Elliot Trudeau. We had a small TV in our burrow and although it’s going back to before, properly speaking, I was a foetus, I remember seeing him on Front Page Challenge. Are you kidding me? He was Justice Minister in the Lester B. Pearson government. In the what? Who? Scrunch up your face and say, “He what? What kinda crazy-bacon stuff this dude been smokin?”

I digress. Remember when people used to do that. Digress? No? Forget it then. PET and his team won the election. You don’t have to take my word for it. It’s in all the history books and is recorded in old cave paintings near Ottawa, Ontario or somewhere. Not sure. Nothing’s gonna change that today or any other day. There’s an election on. Federal election.